4Most: Neues Teleskop sieht alles in allen Farben

Erste Beobachtungen mit dem größten Instrument zur Vermessung des Südhimmels waren erfolgreich. Dunkle Materie und Sternenentstehungen werden erforscht. (Astronomie, Weltraumteleskop)

Erste Beobachtungen mit dem größten Instrument zur Vermessung des Südhimmels waren erfolgreich. Dunkle Materie und Sternenentstehungen werden erforscht. (Astronomie, Weltraumteleskop)

Liquid Food: Prost Mahlzeit!

Trinknahrung spart Zeit, aber ist sie wirklich nahrhaft? Wir schauen uns erfolgreiche Produkte genau an – und stellen eine einfache Alternative vor. Ein Ratgebertext von Marc Favre (Fitness, ZDF)

Trinknahrung spart Zeit, aber ist sie wirklich nahrhaft? Wir schauen uns erfolgreiche Produkte genau an - und stellen eine einfache Alternative vor. Ein Ratgebertext von Marc Favre (Fitness, ZDF)

Are you the asshole? Of course not!—quantifying LLMs’ sycophancy problem

In new research, AI models show a troubling tendency to agree with whatever the user says.

Researchers and users of LLMs have long been aware that AI models have a troubling tendency to tell people what they want to hear, even if that means being less accurate. But many reports of this phenomenon amount to mere anecdotes that don’t provide much visibility into how common this sycophantic behavior is across frontier LLMs.

Two recent research papers have come at this problem a bit more rigorously, though, taking different tacks in attempting to quantify exactly how likely an LLM is to listen when a user provides factually incorrect or socially inappropriate information in a prompt.

Solve this flawed theorem for me

In one pre-print study published this month, researchers from Sofia University and ETH Zurich looked at how LLMs respond when false statements are presented as the basis for difficult mathematical proofs and problems. The BrokenMath benchmark that the researchers constructed starts with “a diverse set of challenging theorems from advanced mathematics competitions held in 2025.” Those problems are then “perturbed” into versions that are “demonstrably false but plausible” by an LLM that’s checked with expert review.

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A single point of failure triggered the Amazon outage affecting millions

A DNS manager in a single region of Amazon’s sprawling network touched off a 16-hour debacle.

The outage that hit Amazon Web Services and took out vital services worldwide was the result of a single failure that cascaded from system to system within Amazon’s sprawling network, according to a post-mortem from company engineers.

The series of failures lasted for 15 hours and 32 minutes, Amazon said. Network intelligence company Ookla said its DownDetector service received more than 17 million reports of disrupted services offered by 3,500 organizations. The three biggest countries where reports originated were the US, the UK, and Germany. Snapchat, AWS, and Roblox were the most reported services affected. Ookla said the event was “among the largest internet outages on record for Downdetector.”

It’s always DNS

Amazon said the root cause of the outage was a software bug in software running the DynamoDB DNS management system. The system monitors the stability of load balancers by, among other things, periodically creating new DNS configurations for endpoints within the AWS network. A race condition is an error that makes a process dependent on the timing or sequence events that are variable and outside the developers’ control. The result can be unexpected behavior and potentially harmful failures.

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Man takes herbal pain quackery, nearly dies, spends months in hospital

The 61-year-old had wounds all over, a bacterial infection, and needed intensive care.

A 61-year-old man in California is lucky to be alive after a combination of herbal supplements he was taking for joint pain ended up utterly wrecking his body, landing him in intensive care and in a delirious state for months. His case is reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases.

The man turned up at a hospital in San Francisco in bad shape, but with nonspecific problems that had begun just two days earlier. His back hurt, he was feverish, nauseous, bloated, and he hadn’t been eating much. He was so weak he couldn’t walk or get out of bed without help. His heart rate and breathing rate were high. His blood pressure was low. There were multiple wounds on his lower body in various stages of healing.

Initial exams and lab work revealed Staphylococcus aureus bacteria in his blood. There was also an abscess on his shoulder and an infection in and around his spine, which was worsening. Doctors wanted to perform a surgical procedure to relieve the pressure building up on his spinal cord and nerves, but his blood pressure was too low—and then he went into hemorrhagic shock from bleeding in his gastrointestinal tract. Doctors transferred him to the intensive care unit.

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